


Reworked, Remade, Reborn

by EssayOfThoughts



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Contemplation, Gen, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Rebirth as a Motif
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-05-24 18:02:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14959422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: The team is made of broken people, it always is. People who go through this and that and the other until they come out the other side something else.A reworking, a remaking, a rebirth.





	Reworked, Remade, Reborn

**Author's Note:**

> Largely written while listening to [_Little Poor Me_ by Layto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S19A6l2OUA) and [_Chaos Theory_ by Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SwtzK5DLIA).

**i.**   
When he gets back they leave him alone in a room for almost half an hour. The cuts on his feet are already scabbed and healing and for once in his life all of the exercise doesn’t make his lungs feel like they’re about to explode out of his chest. Hell, he could  _ swim _ now, properly, in the river and not have to fear whatever diseases it might carry, or the cold, or the fact his legs were weak. He was  _ strong _ now, in a way he’d never been before. His hands are different. His height. He’s lost the scrawny stick-thin look he’s had all his life, lost the asthma, lost all his allergies.

Lost Erskine.

That’s the first thing they tell him when they come in - Colonel Phillips and Agent Carter. Carter’s hand rests on his shoulder for just a moment as she says, “They couldn’t save him, Steve, I’m sorry.”

Her hand squeezes his shoulder. For a moment he remembers her hand on his chest when he’d stepped out of the machine, felt her hand on what was now a plane of muscle and  _ known _ that he was different now in a way that hadn’t felt quite real when he’d been in the machine, in agony, or when Erskine and Stark had helped him out. 

“The agent,” Phillips says. “What’d you get out of him?”

 

* * *

 

**ii.**   
He doesn’t say anything. Hell, what can you say,  _ Hey, I think the weedy German scientist’s serum did something because now my bruises vanish in less than a day? _

No. No need to make them worried, no need to get himself hauled off for a battery of tests, no need to admit that maybe the war has changed something beyond just giving him nightmares he wishes he could wake from some other way than yelling or silent terror.

His bruises heal faster. His cuts scab over in moments. His eyesight… is it sharper, or is he just getting better at sniping? His aim is better too, but again, that might just be practice. He hopes it's just practice. He hopes his reflexes aren’t actually as much faster than he feels like they are, that it's just practice, its just knowing Steve.

Then he falls from the train.

Then they take the ruin of his arm.

Then they freeze him, and unfreeze him and do… something to his head.

Memories drift. Memories vanish. 

His healing remains.

They bolt a metal arm into his shoulder, and it flexes and moves almost like the real thing. Later, when all his memories are gone, he wonders at the arm. Why does he have it? Why does he need it? He knows how quickly his bruises heal, how quickly his cuts scab over, that no other man could survive the cryopod or the machine that turns his world to blinding pain for a moment before he comes out, mind clean as a whistle. 

But he has the arm.

Sometimes, in his lucid moments, he wonders what could have happened to give him it.

 

* * *

 

**iii.**   
He takes his stance. He stretches his fingers. The others forget this, even Barney does, “ _ Clint, don’t bother, it's all in your shoulders anyway.” _ Even old Barnabas the manager, still half in love with the idea of superheroes, “Come on, Hawkeye, we all know your eyesight is up there with the results of Project Rebirth.”

But he stretches his fingers, clicks his joints. Twirls his wrists around to make sure they’re loose, then extends his arms as far up and as far out as he can until his shoulders pop. 

He sights his target before he pulls his mask down. It’s fine the mask. Its …  _ fine. _ He can work around it, but he wishes he didn’t have to. He’s trained all his life without one, been shooting perfect targets since he was six, do they really honestly think he’s going to miss now? But it’s… something extra and unnecessary. A holdover of Barnabas’ love for the dramatic, for superheroes.

Hawkeye, the masked vigilante.

Ha, as if.

He lifts his bow. He sights down the arrow. The string rests for a moment against his lips and he takes a moment to breathe a prayer onto it, just as he does every time. A hope, a dream, a wish, a prayer.

He checks the sightline. He fires.

The crowd goes wild.

 

* * *

 

**iv.**   
“You are being trained,” the Madame says, “for the glory of Russia. Your parents gave you to our care because they no longer could care for you. Because they wished for you to be strong, girls, to be great.”

Natalia tunes it out. She’s heard it all her life, she could recite it backwards if she was asked. 

“It is your duty-” says the Madame, and Natalia’s mind is already reciting the speech from memory.  _ It is your duty to act in Russia’s best interests. To make your parents proud. To show your training here has made you into the exceptional young women you may become.  _

_ Across the ocean in America, they decided they could  _ make _ a man great with a machine. Here, we know the truth. Greatness is in all of us. It only needs to be nurtured.  _

_ You girls will have no place in the world, because you will be the ones to make and shape the world. To see our country reborn into the greatness it deserves. Just as you have been reborn from nobodies with no purpose into Black Widows of the Red Room. _

But still, Natalia thinks, they are nobodies, with no place in the world.

 

* * *

 

**v.**   
It sleeps in his skin now. That’s all right. All right. Right. It sleeps in his skin, and won’t rise, not just yet. Not just yet. When he’s angry though, that’s the  _ yet. _ When he feels too much or too strongly or when he’s hurt. When emotions flare from vague dullness or from general soft shapes, when they take form, take wings, that,  _ that _ is when Hulk will take him, pour out of some dark hidden place and overtake his form and turn brown-tanned skin to green and the hands of a healer into those which do harm.

He doesn’t want to harm. He doesn’t want-

He didn’t want this. Doesn’t want this. But Ross had forced a decision - and Bruce still doesn’t entirely know why Ross hates him so. Is it because of Betty? He wonders if Ross truly knows his daughter if he thinks that Betty is any weaker than he is. Betty is  _ strong. _ Betty has as much fierceness as her father when she wishes it, and she has wished it for his sake and for hers and against her father both times.

It does no good. Wherever he goes he is hunted if he is not impeccably careful. He’s careful now. He can do that. He can heal as he goes - try to make some small amends for all the harm he’s done. To Harlem, to countless cities he’s been chased through and had to hold Hulk back from, for every time he’s let Hulk out without meaning to.

He’s learned now, though. Learned how to keep Hulk quiet. 

He’s angry. Always angry. It’s always there, simmering at the surface of his mind but never boiling over into the rage that calls forth Hulk. It simply…  _ is. _ A vague soft emotion, present but not strong enough to call Hulk. Not enough to call Hulk, but enough that Hulk can know it is there and be contented by the anger.

He hates it. That he must be angry - and that only feeds the anger - at Ross for forcing the decision, at Project Rebirth and Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark and bloody  _ bloody _ frozen and drowned Steve Rogers for being the success they had never dreamed of before and now was the only thing they  _ could _ dream of.

That they’d dreamed of, and that he’d failed to be.

He keeps the hate. He keeps the anger. He balances his anger carefully, ekes it out like a banked fire.

Rebirth. He wonders why it is that some are reborn to greatness, and others to something far more monstrous.

 

* * *

 

**vi.** **  
** He would shake with anger and with frustration but for the fact he finds he cannot. Cold anger cannot make him shake - but then, he knows why now, why it never has. He is of the cold, in truth, a Jotun, not a true Asgardian child, not a true Asgardian prince, but a lie, an interloper hidden amongst them and let stay at the indulgence of Odin. 

Lying Odin, who lied to him, the god of lies and mischief.

He wonders no longer at how he has always been misunderstood and overlooked. Odin sought to maintain his lie, but could never bear to give his throne to anything less than a true Asgardian. Thor had thought him Asgardian, and never understood why Asgardian pursuits were of so little interest to him. Frigga, dear Frigga, the only one to love him, maybe, but she had babied him, in a way, for he was the younger brother and so he feels he has remained perpetually a child in her eyes.

He will show them, he thinks, show all of them. They have always misjudged him and misunderstood him. Always thought him other than how he is. Now he knows the truth. Now Odin’s lies are laid bare to him and he  _ knows _ now, that it should be no surprise that fighting was not a pursuit that he cared for, nor drinking, nor feasting. All these things he was always led to believe he  _ should _ love or  _ should _ be.

But he needn’t. He is not of Asgard, but of ice. 

Ice is solid, but ice is slippery. Slippery as the serpent he used to pretend to be to prank Thor. 

He knows himself now, and they do not  _ know _ that he knows himself. 

He can remake himself - carved like ice, and melted a touch, and frozen once more into hard and certain truth that slips out of their grasp each time - be reborn, and they will never know until too late. 

He looks at his blue hand, at the red of his eyes and smiles as the disguise he has worn all his life, the face that is as much his as the blue is, slides back over his body.

 

* * *

 

**vii.**   
It feels wrong, being home. Or… maybe it's that being home doesn’t feel like it, now. He sits in his workshop-cum-lab - the only place that feels vaguely home, because here he can create - and barely emerges. Since the cave… Maybe since before that, even, its all felt wrong. He’s been woken up from a dream he didn’t even realise he was living.

He makes weapons. That’s what he’s done all his life, what his father did before him.

But he’s never thought about who ends up on the other end of them. Soldiers. Civilians. Innocents and aggressors both.

But most of all: people. People like Yinsen. Yinsen’s family. Yinsen’s village.

The bombing of the convoy, the cave, these are all aspects of a rebirth, a reawakening. He cannot let himself be numb and locked off from the world as he locked himself off from his parents. The suit - that’s another aspect. The final step. He was powerless. So was Yinsen. Yinsen’s family and his village. With this suit, he can fight that, prevent that, protect them.

Even out the scales.

He’d wondered, once, at his father’s adoration of Captain America. A man made mighty through nigh-magical medicine. 

He looks at his suit designs, at JARVIS’ code, and thinks that maybe this is a new world’s way of doing the same.

 

* * *

 

**viii.**   
Tony’s being reckless. True, thats not odd for Tony, or at least not odd to anyone who knows the face Tony puts on in public.

To anyone who knows him, though - to him, to Pepper, to JARVIS - something is up.

Rhodey just wishes Tony would  _ tell him _ instead of acting out like a spoiled child.

Then again, Tony was exactly that, and for all he’s been through he still likes to act the same as ever.

And now… now Tony is in a suit, drunk as all hell, and throwing the biggest and most public party he can and Rhodey knows it's only a matter of time before he hurts himself, or hurts someone else and falls into a spiral of guilt, hiding in his lab until he emerges with some supposed solution.

_ Fuck that. _ Rhodey climbs in a suit - and he thinks, as it scans his face, that he’s lucky Tony trusts him and Pepper enough that they have free access to virtually everything he owns - and goes to face his best friend.

If Tony isn’t going to act the superhero he is, the  _ adult _ he is, Rhodey supposes he’s gonna have to do it for him.

“I’m only gonna say this once. Get out,” he says, and everyone turns. The faceplate slips down and in the wake of two Iron Man suits in play people recoil, start to scramble to leave. Tony splayed out, clearly drunk and in a Mood, is probably glaring. Rhodey sighs.  _ Always have to be the adult. _ “You don’t deserve to wear one of these. Shut it down!”

 

* * *

 

**ix.**   
The air is cool and dry. The sun is strong. Sometimes when he’s flying Sam can swear he feels the wind beneath his wings, the thermals he swings up on, before using the jets of his pack to push him up a little further. The rest of the squad don’t get it, barring Riley, but then Riley is up there with him, wings and all.

“Squad’s angels,” the boys say. “Saving our asses.”

Flying is freedom. It always has been, from heli to glider, from plane to the wings he wears. He lifts off and suddenly gravity has no meaning but what he wishes it to. 

“We’re different people in the air,” Riley says. “Not bogged down by the world.”

A kind of rebirth, perhaps, with each liftoff, but then what does that make touchdown? He’s not sure.

He’s not sure until the day that something shoots past him and takes out Riley. Suddenly the air is as oppressive as the ground, dragging him down. He tries not to, he spirals, turns a full circle or two, circling like a vulture, to find where Riley’s landed.

He hasn’t landed. Even this far up he sees the blood and the bones, and the broken way Riley’s body lies and he  _ knows. _

Landing is … he doesn’t want to. He logs where Riley is, calls base back. He doesn’t return. He doesn’t dare. He circles and circles, wards off the vultures and scavengers that would come near. 

He follows the squad that takes Riley back, but he doesn’t land until Riley’s body is tucked away in medical.

He lands, and the weight of the world settles around his shoulders, dragging his shoulders down. If his wings were a bird’s they’d touch to the ground.

 

* * *

 

**x.**   
Wanda’s life has been made of death. She wonders at that irony sometimes, and other times it grieves her just to know it. Born after so many of their family had died. Living during riots and warfare until it crashed through the roof and took their parents. The foster system, the streets. Riots and protests, coups and catastrophes. 

People dying all around.

Then, the experiments, and of so many - their group was but twenty, but she  _ knows _ now, that they tried others, almost a hundred all told, all hopeful, all reckless, all, but for she and Pietro, dead. She wonders, sometimes, if so much death was the price of their powers.

Then, now. Pietro gone, his mind torn from hers, a death that should not have been.

The twin she’d been born with, bound to all her life, gone.

Death. Remaking. These are all she has known all her life. 

She looks at Pietro’s body, almost cool. She looks at the future, a twin without a twin. Vengeance shed, home destroyed, so many pieces of who they always were lost or cast aside for sake of survival and each other.

She supposes it is time for a remaking to be a rebirth.

 

* * *

 

**xi.**   
Can you be reborn if you have never even, really, been born at all?

He is not sure what he is. He doubts he ever will be. He is himself, and that will have to be enough.

He is not Ultron. Nor is he JARVIS. Nor is he the mind stone, nor what Ultron intended nor what the Avengers intended.

He is not human, though he has human form, and he is not purely technology though he has aspects of that to his form as well.

He was meant to be Ultron, reborn, or perhaps a new kind of human, something better and more. A rebirth, either way. And yet, he is not. Instead… instead he is himself, nothing and no one more than he is the creature named Vision by both an entity some would call a god and another most would call mad.

It is odd, he thinks, that he was meant to be the rebirth of life, the rebirth of Ultron, and instead he is simply himself, a creature never born at all.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Rhodey's line to Tony is from Iron Man 2. Some of Vision's thoughts reference his lines in _Age of Ultron_ : "Maybe I am a monster. I don't think I'd know if I were one. I'm not what you are, and not what you intended."
> 
> I hope this was, if not enjoyable, at least interesting, and if so I hope you leave comments.


End file.
